Jude and I (and our spouses Wendy and Kat) are WoW players and we often thought we’d like to do a song about it, but we didn’t know exactly what to do until the title suggested itself. (We both play Alliance and Horde characters, for the record.) It was also an 80s classic, and in much the same way that I was very concerned about the bass on “Rage Quitter,” Jude was adamant about doing a great job on Thomas Dolby’s famous synthesizer lines. He also took on the lion’s share of the duties — not only did he have keys to tackle, but electronic drums and synth bass as well. I basically dropped in vocals and the guitar line, which was so simple and straightforward that I wasted a lot of time trying to figure it out when it was in fact the very first thing I picked out by ear. After that, it was death by a thousand cuts — little tweaks, minor issues, small improvements…incremental music creation. We are both glad to have this released. We need some distance from it and probably won’t appreciate it for a while.

At some point I suggested we debut the song with a machinima video, and reached out to a few filmmakers to see if they would be interested. Nobody was — but then again, the song was not complete when we asked, and maybe nobody wanted to take a risk. We ultimately realized that if the community wants a video, the community will provide a video. We are hoping someone out there thinks it’s amusing enough to warrant its own WoW machinima video. Feel free to tell the Scorseses and Spielbergs of the Horde and Alliance if you happen to know them.

This is our 10th song, and the last on what we are now retroactively calling our debut album, Still in Beta. All the MP3s have been refreshed with full ID3v2 tags with album art, artist data, and lyrics embedded in them, and you can download the whole album as a .zip file for one-stop shopping. Ten is a nice round number, and it gave us an excuse to consider what we’ve done in the last four years. It’s not a lot of tracks but it’s been a lot of work — amazingly, we used four different software suites to put it all together. Some of the tracks were done in GarageBand, some in Pro Tools, some in Sony Vegas, and some in Logic Express. The genres are all over the map; the only thing the songs really have in common is they’re about nerd culture and Jude and I recorded them all. After thinking about all that, it felt right to lump these all together in a collection for some closure and say “Well, that’s done.”

Of course, it’s not really “done” and we are not stopping here — the next release will be the beginning of something new. But we will need some time to put that together, and I don’t think we’ll be releasing our next track until some time next year.